@tomdoorley more on kopi luwak

“Never in our dreams did we suspect that we could make money out of them,” said Montenegro, 44, who switched a few years ago from picking ripe cherries on coffee trees to gathering the undigested seeds excreted on the forest floor. Montenegro and Reyes belong to a cooperative that aims to protect the civets, amid a growing trend among farmers and producers to place the animals in cages in a bid to increase harvests. “I feel bad about it because we sort of opened a Pandora’s box wherein people think it’s all about money,” Reyes said. She estimated that 80 percent of civet coffee in the Philippines was now produced using caged animals, and said there were similar problems in Indonesia.